Al Qaeda is revealing its long game in Syria

Members
of Al Qaeda's Nusra Front in a convoy touring villages, which
they said they have seized control of from Syrian rebel factions,
in the southern countryside of Idlib, on December 2,
2014.REUTERS/Khalil
Ashawi

Al Qaeda is employing a strategy that might help the terrorist
group outlast ISIS in Syria, and it's revealing its true jihadist
endgame in the process.

As a different terrorist group, ISIS — aka the Islamic State,
ISIL, or Daesh — claims responsibility for a terrorist attack in
Belgium, Syrian Al Qaeda affiliate the Nusra Front (also known as
Jabhat al-Nusra) is flying under the radar, hoping to continue
gaining influence in Syria.

And experts think that it could be a bigger threat to the US than
ISIS in the long term.

While ISIS has taken over territory in the Middle East with force
and uses violence to repress the populations it controls, the
Nusra Front has been working toward winning popular support
in the country, hoping that its strategy will help it outlast
other jihadist groups.

The Nusra Front has fashioned itself as an important partner in
the uprising against Syrian President Bashar Assad. Unlike ISIS,
which imposes harsh Islamic laws soon after it forcefully seizes
territory, the Nusra Front has generally been slower to crack
down on civilian populations.

The jihadists are waiting for Syrians to slowly come around to
the idea of Islamic rule, which lowers the chance of a successful
uprising if the Nusra Front is able to establish Syria as an
Islamic emirate.

"This is all the long game," Thomas Joscelyn, an Al Qaeda expert
and senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies,
told Business Insider. "The concept of jihad and the notion
of jihad as [Al Qaeda] understands it was missing in Syria for
decades. Their whole idea is to use the war to inculcate the
ideology of jihad among the population, which is a slow process."

Civil war has been dragging on in Syria for the past five years
as Assad fights to hold on to power. Moderate rebels, whose main
focus is on defeating Assad, are struggling to make gains as they
face onslaughts from the regime and jihadist groups like the
Nusra Front.

And ultimately, the jihadist groups who want to see Syria
governed by Islamic law hope to be the last ones standing.
Western experts charge that the Nusra Front has maintained a
tacit coordination with moderate rebels in some areas of Syria,
but that might now be crumbling as the jihadists turn on the
rebels.

Last week, the Nusra Front attacked Division 13, a US-backed
group that's affiliated with the Free Syrian Army, killing about
a dozen rebels and arresting several more.

On March 11, people in Maarrat al-Numan gathered to peacefully
protest the Assad regime, able to do so only because of a
ceasefire [between the regime and the opposition]. Many waved the
flag of the revolution. Jabhat al-Nusra fighters, opposed to any
flag other than their own, stormed into the crowd and assaulted
civilians. In doing so, the group shed its mask of revolutionary
solidarity and revealed its true extremist nature.

"Nusra's stated goal throughout all of Syria from when they first
started until today is to turn Syria into an Islamic emirate,"
Ahmad al-Soud, the commander and founder of Division 13, told
Business Insider through a translator on Friday. "They don't
want any other armed group in Syria except for them, and they
want to turn it into kind of what Afghanistan was under the
Taliban."

Defeating moderate rebels and the regime is the first step, and
then the Nusra Front will face other jihadist groups like ISIS.

"Once they ... get rid of all the other groups, [the Nusra Front]
can finally duke it out between them and ISIS for who's the
worst," Soud said.

Protesters
carry Free Syrian Army flags and chant slogans during an
antigovernment protest in the town of Marat Numan in Idlib
Province, Syria, on March 4, 2016.REUTERS/Khalil Ashawi

Jennifer Cafarella, a Syria analyst at the Institute for the
Study of War, laid out the Nusra Front's strategy
in an op-ed for CNN:

Jabhat al-Nusra is leveraging its battlefield contributions to
create relationships with civil society, civilian populations and
other Syrian opposition groups. It then manipulates those
relationships in order to achieve dominance. And it directly
targets US-backed groups, and defeats them when it can, in order
to ensure that moderate forces do not find footing in a new
Syria.

Soud denied any coordination with the Nusra Front. But he did
acknowledge that some Syrians had initially accepted the Nusra
Front as a partner in fighting the Assad regime.

"The most important thing is that the world understands that the
Syrian people reject Al Qaeda's ideology," Soud said. "We
reluctantly allowed Nusra into Syria because our main enemy is
the regime. After the regime is gone, we will continue to fight
anybody who tries to implement their will against the people."

As long as Assad remains a player on the Syrian battlefield,
moderate rebels will face a stalemate of sorts — because they're
fighting jihadists and the regime, their already-scant resources
will be spread too thin for them to win out over anyone.

"As long as the Assad regime is still around, you're still going
to have different extremist groups in Syria and they're not going
to leave, we're not going to be able to get them out," Soud said.
"We can't fight on all these different fronts against the regime
and against ISIS and against Nusra."

Members
of the Nusra Front drive in a convoy as they tour villages, which
they said they have seized control of from Syrian rebel factions,
in the southern countryside of Idlib, on December 2,
2014.Reuters

The report stated that the Nusra Front posed "one of the most
significant long-term threats" of any jihadist group.

"This Al Qaeda affiliate has established an expansive network of
partnerships with local opposition groups that have grown either
dependent on or fiercely loyal to the organization," the report
said. "Its defeat and destruction must be one of the highest
priorities of any strategy to defend the United States and Europe
from Al Qaeda attacks."

Cafarella, one of the coauthors of the report, wrote in her CNN
op-ed that America's focus on defeating ISIS "has played directly
into the group's hands, allowing the group to exploit its time
out of the spotlight and set up a return to the global stage once
ISIS is defeated."

Syrian civilians are fighting back against the Nusra Front in
some areas, but it's unclear how long they can hold out if the
Assad regime keeps bombing rebel-held areas and ISIS continues
its brutal rule.

Moderate rebels are in many cases outmatched when they go up
against jihadists and the Assad regime, which have more funding
and resources coming in from outside donors or, in the case of
the regime, allies like Russia and Iran.

"A group like Division 13 doesn't have a national program," said
Joscelyn, the Al Qaeda expert. "The FSA doesn't have a national
program, so they weren't going to govern all of Idlib."